CONCLUSIONS. LEGACY AND INNOVATION IN THE TROPICS

In the opening chapter of his book on the British and Spanish Empires, John H. El­liott argued that, arriving in the New World, most of the colonizers - with the pos­sible exception of some groups of political or religious dissenters, as was the case in North America, but not in Brazil - had a well established idea of what society and rule were.

For the colonizers (not, naturally, for the colonized), metropolis and colonies formed a quasi continuum of common traditions (including political traditions and representations), of language, of human relationships, and of mercantile links. It is, thus, very difficult to find a colonial (say, a Brazilian) institution or social constel­lation whose matrix cannot be located in the European legal or institutional tradi­tion. In a word, (human) nurture clearly superseded (environmental) nature. This is why the history of colonists’ societies - in their deepest cultural layers, like those of family, of politics, of social representations, of religion - would be, for a long time, a variant of European history. These societies, despite being the holders of a deep rooted culture (although a “traveling one” (James Clifford), open to change and to exchange), were not holistic entities kept apart from the metropolis.

Colonial societies, of course, were not static.^[479] New skills were acquired, new needs arose from the new environment, and new suggestions arrived, also from the Old World. I believe that many colonists would have liked to build Brazil as “an­other Portugal”; not a few put it clearly in their writings.^[480] Most of these supporters of the Luso-Brazilian cloning were quite aware that the meso-conditions and the distance would differentiate and set apart the tropical societies. For them, however, this differentiation was not a project or a desired aim, but rather something that was inscribed in the very nature of things and, therefore, had to be taken as a burden or a cost. They did not consider these differences disruptive. Far from being hostile to such renewal and differentiation, the Ancien Regime’s political matrix favored di­versity and asymmetry, within a pragmatic (not programmatic, as the Enlighten­ment would be) approach to societies and polities.

The ancient manner of relationship between unity and diversity is also a Leit- faden to historians. The fact that they find differences between historical situations and contexts is the outcome of one of their crucial regulae artis. This art forces them to contextualize over and over, and to be faithful to every fact and to every local reverberation of these facts.

In order to avoid misunderstanding, I would like to clarify that when I propose the use of the European categories of the Ancien Regime to interpret early modern colonial societies, I speak now of the colonists’ society. Furthermore, the dominant political culture, because of its hegemonic place but also because of its spongiform character, could easily absorb heteronymous elements, converting them to models and figures familiar to the European political tradition. Thus, the representative of the Chinese Emperor in Canton became a “viceroy,” the communal land of the Goan villages became some kind of emphyteusis, the model of land succession in the Zambeze basin was legally rebuilt as something between a majorat and aprazo, the cohort of clients of African chieftains were assimilated to slaves, and the multi­form figures of domestic dependence within the traditional European big household were rich enough to absorb the social bounds weaved inside the Brazilian engenho or inside the Casa Grande. Out of sight were the other norms, fidelities and politi­cal images, fueled by native or enslaved populations; the locus of their expression was also out of the political spaces of the colonists’ society: hidden in the bush, in the quilombo, in the senzala or in the terreiro, sung in hermetic lyrics, disguised in syncretic religious rites, revealed in invisible signs.